Recently, I found this article in a PDF version online while searching for information about specific jazz musicians who played in the ballrooms of Shanghai in the 1930s. This is a fascinating firsthand account by a westerner who was interned in prison camps by the Japanese military in China during WWII. For those unfamiliar with the background, during WWII, after the Pearl Harbor incident in December 1941, the Japanese began to round up Allied nationals and put them into internment camps outside of Shanghai, Tianjin and other cities with a large foreign population. The prisoners were released after the Japanese surrendered in August 1945. This account is fascinating for its reminiscence of how jazz musicians from China’s club scenes came together to play and perform in the prison camps, to the delight of the inmates and at least some Japanese officers and guards. It is a testament to the endurance of the human spirit and to the power of music, and a fascinating read in relation to the times we live in right now. This article was so interesting that I decided to republish it so that it might find a wider audience.
The Jazz Scene at Japanese Prison Camps in China.
By Desmond Power, West Vancouver, BC, Canada.
June 2012.
Desmond Power in 1940s
Never mind that I was living in far off Tientsin, North China when World War II broke out in Europe, I did my duty by enlisting in the Volunteer Defence Corps. Being in the Corps had its compensa- tions. Donned in my formal blue dress uniform I could pass off as a full blown adult and so gain entrance to Little Club Ballroom, the night spot that was the talk of the town. You couldn’t miss its notice in all the dailies.
My first time there the place was bouncing. I forget the number they were playing, but the beat of the bass and the incredible runs of the reeds and brass sent me whirling into another world. I was back again, and yet again, and never was disappointed.
Then it ended, as it had to end, that cozy world of ours. At dawn on December 8th, (Dec 7th at Pearl Harbor) Japanese storm troops swarmed into the concession, and they did so without a shot fired. The regular British garrison had long withdrawn from Tientsin, and Volunteers on duty were ordered to slip away and get into their civvies. None were taken prisoner, which was not the case with the US Marines and a score of civilians deemed dangerous enough to the Empire of Japan to be locked up alongside the Marines in their barracks. Allied nationals were free to roam the British Concession but not step outside it. And Little Club on Wusih Road in the ex-German Concession was outside, maybe by only a few yards, but outside all the same in now forbidden territory.
With banks and businesses closed, many Allied nationals soon ran out of money even for food. With help from the Swiss Consul, the Masonic Hall on Race Course Road was converted into a mess where they could get a free meal. When I showed up there, the man running the place asked if I would help out by serving as a waiter. My OK was the best decision I made for a long time. One of the first tables I served was occupied by several of “Earl Whaley’s Coloured Boys”.
After eating, they moved to a seating area where there was a grand piano. The tallest one, the handsome and debonair one, ran his fingers over the keys. Then he drifted into We Three with such a delicate touch that we servers stood transfixed. We soon learned his name was Stoffer. And it wasn’t long before we got to share jokes with him and with Jonesy, the boisterous happy-go-lucky string bass player. Stoffer introduced us to others of the group, saxophonist Earl Whaley and clarinet man Wayne Adams.
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They say that life is full of surprises, but what they don’t say is that some are only meant to tease. At the Masonic Hall one day, I was confronted by Mr Coghill the British Vice Consul. “How would you like to get to freedom,” he asked. “There’s a prisoner exchange ship at Shanghai, the Kamakura Maru, which will be taking us diplomats home. There are a few spare berths and we can get you one of them.” How could I not jump at the chance! So in August 1942 I joined the trainload of happy Britons heading for freedom.
The Kamakura Maru sailed off all right, but without me. My berth and those of a good few others had been snaffled from under our feet by British Taipans.
So with the connivance of fellow Brits I found myself in Pootung camp, which turned out to be one of the worst of all the Japanese prison camps in China. It comprised a network of closely connected concrete warehouses long abandoned by the British American Tobacco Company as being unfit for storing tobacco (see picture below). But not unfit for storing humans according to the Japanese who jam-packed 1,200 single men from all walks of Shanghai life into the place and provided them with rations hardly enough to keep a bird alive. Maintain a stiff upper lip our leaders told us, we won’t be here long. But the never ending string of Japanese victories that came over the loudspeakers told us otherwise. Our morale hit rock bottom.
Pootung Prison Camp
Passing through the camp’s crowded quadrangle one day I stopped to watch a dozen or so men mostly Blacks all with musical instruments seated on stools and chairs in two close rows. The sharp rap of a baton started off a beautifully stroked intro from a guitar that lifted saxophones, trombones, cornets into a buoyant rendition of that old standard There’ll be Some Changes Made. While my heart was beating like mad, the saxes took off on a practice run of their own, then a trombone by itself, then once again, the baton rapped, and the gui- tarist re-launched the band with his breathtaking intro. A guitarist at heart, I stayed glued to the spot in seventh heaven.
Band practice over, the musicians packed their instruments and collected their chairs. When the Black guitarist had some trouble with his awkward folding metal seat, I stepped forward and offered to carry it for him. A big smile and he led the way up to the third storey
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of the main warehouse where he bunked with two dozen others. I went into a dither when he gave my hand a warm shake. But I was conscious enough to notice the name painted on his guitar case: Dick Reynolds – Metropole Ballroom.
What a godsend, that band, lifting the camp’s morale as nothing else could! All top musi- cians they had played at Shanghai’s best ballrooms and nightclubs. There was Jim Staley of Shanghai Little Club fame, and Bob Hill of Venus Ballroom, and there was Tommy Missman, Charlie Jones, Lestor Vactor, Fred Haussman, Sonny Lewis, each a star in his own right.
Pootung’s internees could never have enough of the concerts the band put on for them. For two whole hours they forgot they were prisoners. And it wasn’t all jazz music; there were song and dance acts. Back in the States, Dick Reynolds had been in vaudeville, and by the sheerest coincidence his roly-poly partner from those days, Theodore “Bubbles” Dyer, happened also to be in camp. A crew member of SS President Harrison he had been taken prisoner when his ship, pursued by the Japanese navy, ran itself aground. That Black pair’s sparkling performance of I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You, just about brought the concrete roof down.
Even before I got to Pootung, I had outgrown “cowboy” chords. Now with amazing gen- erosity Dick gave freely of his time demonstrating how to cover all six strings with full majors and minors and augmented ninths. He explained the importance of the right hand and how to pick runs. But above all, he risked his precious Gibson by letting me take it through packs of bustling internees to my own block for an hour every day.
A Eurasian roommate of Dickie Reynold’s broke from shooting craps when I happened to mention the name Earl Whaley. “I knew him at St Anna’s Ballroom,” he burst out. Where is he now?” And that’s how I got to know Eddie Esmond who was not a musician, not even a Shanghailander. Though from Peking, he knew Shanghai night life through and through. He knew how to wangle free meals at Farren’s Gam- bling Casino. He knew everyone that counted at the Paramount Ballroom on Yu Yuen Road and also at the Casa Nova on Avenue Edward VII in the French Concession. He knew most of the camp band, and it was he who introduced me to the clarinetist Tom- my Missman when we crazy fools thought we could build up our bodies by doing Charles Atlas exercis- es on a skywalk roof. When one morning a guard barked at us to get off the roof, Tommy amazed me
by his sweet-talking the fellow in good Japanese to let us stay. Apparently, Tommy had picked up Japa- nese during the years his band played at Tokyo night spots. For sure the Japanese wife he married there had a hand in enhancing his fluency.
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Eddie helped me on to a raised platform opposite the main gate on that one occasion when the band brought onlooking prisoners to tears. The US and Japanese governments had agreed to an exchange of civilian prisoners, and when that big moment came in September 1943, the band gave a rousing send off to those hundred lucky ones exiting Pootung. And when one of their own, Freddie Haussman, went past waving good-bye they broke into a number right on the button – San Francisco Here I Come.
I had no inkling of it then, but not many days later, having been drafted for transfer to Lun- ghua camp at the opposite end of Shanghai, I too exited Pootung. Not easy saying good- bye to Dickie Reynolds, Jimmy Agnew, Solomon Delborgo, Denis O’Shea, Eddie Esmond and all those others I had palled up with in camp. On more than one occasion, Eddie told me that his mother and sister, Nora and Deirdre Esmond, had been sent from their home in Peking to Weihsien camp. He now begged me on the off chance that I might ever get up there to let them know he was OK.
The countryside freshness of Lunghua was a big improvement over the twice breathed air of Pootung. And the better rations and presence of girls was a welcome change for sure, but how I missed that jazz band. Word got around that I played the guitar, and next thing I was enrolled in the camp’s dance band. We were amateurs, though our leader, Ikey Abraham, a sparkling drummer, could have passed off as a pro any day of the week. Even so, to those inmates who transferred in with us from Pootung we must have sounded flat compared to the real thing. However, they didn’t have to suffer me long. Only five months later, the Commandant ordered me to be shunted me off to Weihsiein camp in Shantung Province, 700 miles north of Shanghai. I must have made some impact on Ikey, for he wrote this, signing himself as “TAIPAN”, in my autograph album on the day of my departure.
Two days and a night by train and I was together again with my family and Tientsin school pals. Assigned to work as a stoker at Tientsin Kitchen where 900 internees were fed, I was astounded to find that my fellow stoker on our two-man shift was none other than Reginald Jones that marvelous bass man from Little Club. He didn’t remember me at Tientsin’s Ma- sonic Hall. No wonder, it was 3:45 a.m., the single incandescent dangling from the ceiling giving off only a dim light, it was freezing cold, and no time for talk. The water in the giant cauldrons was supposed to be on the boil before the cooks arrived on shift at 6:30, so we had to go hard at it, drawing clinkers and hustling life into the fires.
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Soon as we could take it easy, Jonesy gave me the news that Earl Whaley and Wayne Adams were in Weihsien, but not Stoffer. His appendix had ruptured the day he arrived in camp when the hospital was still in shambles, and he died before they could get him to one in Tsingtao. Our mood brightened only when the cooks arrived. Their mirthful exchanges with Jonesy told me how warmly they regarded him. Clearly he was a wag and banterer of which I was to see more of at mid morning when the all female vegetable squad arrived on shift. Their chatter, excited by his presence, turned to shrieks at some madcap antic of his.
In the building where Jonesy was quartered I got to meet up again with Earl Whaley and Wayne Adams, and also two new faces, Hawaiians, George Alawa and George Beck. All were keen to hear what I could tell them about their jazz brethren in Pootung. First, I gave them the bad news I’d heard when in Lunghua that Tommy Missman had fallen from a skywalk and was lying with broken bones in Pootung’s sick bay. As for the good news, all the other jazz players were fit and well. They kept their hand in by giving regular concerts that were eagerly attended not only by the internees, but also the Japanese from the high and mighty Commandant down to the lowly guards who always grabbed the front seats.
Earl Whaley offered that they too kept in practice by playing at dances. He and the others had brought in their instruments with them, but not Jonesy, though he fared well enough on the cello the good Anglican Bishop lent him. As for the Shanghai jazz men I named, he knew most of them when his Red Hot Syncopators played there at St Anna’s Ballroom.
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He added that of the two Syncopaters who were now in Weihsien, I already knew the one who’d been prominent on the US West Coast as Evelyn Bundy’s lead clarinet man – Wayne Adams. The other, the gifted guitarist, Earl Kilgore West, was probably new to me.
The next dance was a week off and I had better get there early, the place filled quickly. The two Georges, Alawa and Beck, would be playing, and Lope Sarreal too. An entertainment promoter from the Philippines, Lope was equally well known as a fine trumpeter and band leader. But he wouldn’t be leading. Guitarist Earl West was now leader.
Guitarist band leader? Yes, Sir, band leader and a fine one. After the Syncopators broke up in Shanghai and went up north to Tientsin to play with Lope Sarreal’s Swing Band, West headed for Peking 80 miles still further north where he formed his own group Earl West and His Night Owls. Though they were a hit at their Peking hotel, his Night Owls did take on one night stands at other locations. Here they are at Tientsin’s Villa West Lake Hotel. Note the mix of Black and White jazz men which includes Jonesy on loan from Little Club.
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And now here he was in Weihsien, Earl West, a powerfully built man, standing with mem- bers of his dance band in a space cleared of tables in Tientsin Kitchen’s eating area. He began by snapping off a catchy all-chords intro on his resonant guitar that launched the combo into bouncing choruses of Shine, he, Jonesy, and the two Hawaiians coming in with peppy vocals that had the dancing couples showing their appreciation with bursts of ap- plause. And more hand claps when Lope Sarreal delivered a terrific trumpet solo of Peanut Vendor. If my memory serves me right, the Hawaiians followed with Sweet Leilani, Alawa taking the melody with heavenly sweetness on his steel guitar. And then the whole combo with Earl West leading a jaunty Coquette after which they came on with a great selection of old favorites before hotting it up in a grand finale with an uproarious Nagasaki.
Jonesy
Jonesy was not one of Whaley’s Red Hot Syncopators, but his back- ground was no less distinctive, his father being a teacher at Michigan Conservatory, and a brother, Reunald, number one trumpeter with Count Basie and Woody Herman. He himself was no slouch on the double bass, starring at Harlem’s Cotton Club before joining Charlie Echols’s renowned fourteen piece band. When trumpeter Buck Clayton joined that band he must have hit it off with Jonesy, for when in 1934 he formed his Harlem Gentleman to go out to Shanghai to play at the Canidrome Ballroom, he took Jonesy with him. (Here’s a picture of Jonesy per kind favor of Fern West.)
The growing menace of Japan’s militarism and their acts of terrorism in Shanghai’s foreign settlements was sufficient writing on the wall for Clayton to pull out. When he offered passages home to members of his band, Jonesy was the single standout against going. He had a Philippine sweetie he could not leave. But leave her he did. Next thing he showed up as one of Earl Whaley’s “Coloured Boys” who had contracted with promoter Lope Sarreal to play at Tientsin’s Little Club.
I’d not forgotten my promise to Eddie Esmond in Pootung that I would look up his mother if I ever got to Weihsien. Nora Esmond turned out to be an attractive fair-haired English lady in her forties. At hearing what I had to say about her Julian Warrick Edward, which were Eddie’s full given names, she gave a shout of joy, then pleaded with me to pass on the news to her daughter, Deirdre, who had married in camp and was now Mrs West.
Nothing prepared me for the surprises that lay in store when I intro- duced myself to Deirdre. First, unlike her brother who was swarthy for a Eurasian, she had the pale porcelain skin of a Merle Oberon. Second, when her husband stepped out of the hut to greet me, I was staring into the face of that big strapping guitarist, Earl West. All I could do was mumble some gibberish, but it was the start of a solid friendship that was to last until our final day in camp a year-and-a-half later. Over that time, I showed him the chords and runs Dickie Reynolds had taught me, and he elaborated on how important it was to do all that in different keys. Occasionally when he let sit in with the band, what a triumph when he’d wink to tell me I was doing things right!
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Having learned that Earl’s jazz group had been based in Peking, and knowing that Deirdre grew up there, I wondered if the two had met before the war. Anyway, the couple’s lovely daughter Fern was born soon after the Japanese handed out parcels from the American Red Cross. Among each parcel’s precious items was a large tin of Klim. I wasted no time hand- ing over my Klim to Deirdre.
Deep concern spread among us when in the spring of 1945 Earl Whaley was rushed to the camp hospital suffering from acute appendicitis. We who knew of Stoffer’s tragic end kept our fingers crossed. Thank God, Earl survived the surgery. Soon as visitors were allowed, I went around to see him. He lay in much distress, his stomach bloated with gas. He asked me to call the nurse. When I did, that fierce matron of the Royal College of Nursing gave me hell and sent me packing. Back in his quarters, Earl’s full recovery took weeks during which time he avoided getting involved in the sometimes noisy discussions with his room mates, but he did appreciate the bits and pieces of war news that I gleaned from newspapers discarded by the guards – Japanese Kanji script carrying the same meaning as tradition- al Chinese characters. Throughout his convalescence he had another constant visitor, the mysterious Tartar-born Ahmad Kammal who had been a guide of sorts with the 1930 Roy Chapman Andrews Expedition in Mongolia. Kamal struck me as an unapproachable loner so all the more did I find it strange the friendship that developed between the two.
As viewed from outside the camp, the hospital where Olympics Gold Medallist Eric Liddell died and where Earl West’s daughter Fern was born and where Earl Whaley had his appendix removed.
Note the guard tower and electrified barbed wire to deter would-be escapers.
Our internment ended with a suddenness that astonished us all. Though for several days rumours abounded that Japan had surrendered, the guards remained armed and were ready to shoot to kill. Then on August 17, a lone four engine US plane flew over the camp, circled it once, twice, and then dropped a team of seven OSS parachuters within two hundred yards of the camp walls. That must have taken extraordinary courage, the seven being so
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lightly armed for a mission of such high aspirations as forcing the Commandant and his guards and the nearby Weihsien garrison to hand over control of the camp to US authority. It was almost beyond belief that the Japa- nese gave in so abjectly.
Within days, squadrons of giant B29s were dropping into and around the camp great loads of food and medicine and clothing. Specialist teams from US bases in Western China landed at the nearby Japanese fighter airstrip with film projectors, loudspeakers and latest issues of Time and Life to “re-orientate” us.
It was carnival time and our camp band gave as much as it received, surprising our liberators with the quality of its jazz. With Lope and his trumpet in the lead, the band marched up and down Main Road sounding off hearty choruses of The Saints Go Marching In and Glory Glory Hallelujah and the like. At the ball field they put on and a show encouraged by an exuberant US Serviceman who joined in playing some sort of kazoo, his improvisations astonishing both musicians and onlookers for their sheer brilliance.
At first we basked in the glory of liberation from the Japanese jackboot, but as the weeks passed and we were still stuck in the place our spirits took a dive. And it didn’t help matters to learn that the embarkation port of Tsingtao, now occupied by the US 7th Marines, was only three hours away by train. It took our leaders to tell us that Japan’s defeat had caused the long brewing Chinese Civil War to burst out into the open, bringing road and rail traffic to a standstill, and that because it seemed we were in for the long haul we might as well undergo the re- orientation the Americans had planned for us. One of the American lecturers who’d seen Belsen told us of his surprise at finding our camp in such good health. We’d apparently escaped starvation, disease, and bestiality of the guards. How could I not agree with him? My family and friends had come through in reasonably good shape, the jazz musicians: Whaley, Adams, West, Jones, Sarreal, Beck were all sound of life and limb. That huge goitre on George Alawa’s neck he’d brought into camp with him.
It was during this time of limbo, waiting for things to happen, that I heard Earl West wanted to see me. When I got to his hut, he held out his precious guitar and told me it was mine to keep. I refused, of course. But he was adamant. He wouldn’t take no. To this very day, the man’s incredible generosity stuns my mind.
Soon afterwards two trains did make it through to Tsingtao taking a quarter of the camp population with them. Gone were girl friends, workmates, roommates, those I stood in roll call line with twice a day for the past eighteen months. Earl and Deirdre West and Jonesy and Earl Whaley were gone and I don’t remember saying good-bye to them or to any other member of the band.
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When another four weeks went by with no train making it through, the Americans with their incredible genius for planning and organization took command of the airstrip and flew out the rest of the camp in a matter of two days. My mother, half-brother, half-sister and I were taken by C47 to Tientsin, our hometown before the war. But I did not stay long in China, I moved from there to England to New Zealand to Canada where I now reside.
Some time in the mid-sixties when I met up with schoolmate and Weihsien roommate Douglas Finlay, I bemoaned the sad fact that every member of the camp band had disappeared off the face of the earth the moment they departed by train to Tsingtao. He looked me in the eye and said not so. A few years back he had run smack into Jonesy. It happened he said on a Sunday morning when he and his wife Yvonne had walked past Hotel Vancouver on Georgia Street. Approaching them on the sidewalk was a hefty Black. In the instant that he and Jonesy recognized each other they embraced and exchanged shouts of joyous laughter. As it turned out, they were to have no opportunity of renewing their friendship, for Jonesy had just completed a gig at The Cave Supper Club and was heading back to the States.
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It was good to know that Jonesy had got back to work on the bandstand, and a top band at that, for the Cave on 626 Hornby Street hosted only the foremost bands and entertainers amongst whom were Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Sophie Tucker, Lena Horne, the Ink Spots.
News of other Weihsien jazz musicians hit me in the oddest circumstances. In 1998 when I was in South Pasadena, CA, visiting a friend from my Tientsin school days, she showed me a business card that had been presented to her back in the 1960s by a real estate agent who told her that he had met a number Tientsin people while he was Weihsien prison camp during the war. The name on the card: Earl Whaley.
With the arrival of internet search engines, I came up blank with searches on Earl West, Wayne Adams, Dickie Reynolds, but I had better luck with jazz trumpeter and entertain- ments promoter Lope Sarreal. A web site told me that he died in 1995 in his 90th year. Hon- ored as the Grand Old Man of Asian Boxing he had been inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, New York, for bringing that sport alive in the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan and Korea.
I’d given up hope of ever hearing of the Wests again when ten years ago out of the blue the words “Deirdre, the beautiful Eurasian wife of a Black musician” sprang out at me from an autobiography Adopted the Chinese Way written by Peking-born Marguerite Church. More than once in the book she told of meeting Deirdre aboard the attack transport USS Lavacawhile it was repatriating US citizens from war-torn China.
I was in for an even bigger surprise when I came across a photograph among Kim Smith’s collection on the web of wonderful historic sketches, paintings, and photographs created by her father William A Smith while assigned to Weihsien prison camp as an officer serving in the OSS. The photo gives a bird’s eye view of a truckload of internees heading for the railway station to board the train bound for Tsingtao. The couple with their backs to the cab have to be Earl and Deirdre West with perhaps infant Fern on Deirdre’s lap.
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Then, wonder of wonders, I made contact with Fern West who was but a mere infant sit- ting up in a cot outside her parents’ prison camp quarters when I last set eyes on her. In the flurry of correspondence that now passed between us she told me that soon as they arrived in the States following their liberation from Weihsien, Earl and Deirdre decided to settle in San Francisco’s Bay Area. And it was there that they began adding to their family: son Earl Leland in ’46, daughter Iris in ’47, and son David in ’56.
Fern well remembers her father practicing for so long and hard on the guitar that even at the age of eight she could hum the tunes as he played them: Brazil, Temptation, Begin the Beguine. She went on to say that he did manage to get some jobs at night clubs, but they came so few and far between he was obliged to move on to other work.
From hindsight we can see that regaining his playing dexterity was not the only challenge facing Earl. Times had changed. Electric guitar instrumentalists with their emphasis on riffs and solo leads had so grown in popularity they were filling the job slots. And then there was the arrival of bebop whose chord dissonances must have sounded foreign to jazz men, some taking to it without qualm, others turned off by its strangeness. When Earl met up with Jonesy in post war USA (it happened only the once according to Fern), bebop and how to take to it must surely have come up between them.
Among the precious photographs Fern sent me is this one of Deirdre and the couple’s son Earl Leland and daughter Fern taken in 1950 in a community park. When I asked Fern how come Earl was not present, she said he was – he took the photo.
Deirdre West (wife of Earl West) and the couple’s son Earl Leland and daughter Fern taken in 1950
What struck hardest from everything that Fern told me about the family was Earl’s death on October 19 1959 of lung cancer. He was only 49. That not only closed a chapter for me, but also for a number of Weihsien internees upon whom he’d made a lasting impression.
Of those still alive today I can think of Ralph Baltau whose missionary parents were next door neighbors to Earl and Deirdre in their prison hut. Ralph fondly remembers a dark- skinned man with a name sounding like “Wes” for his many acts of kindness such as taking him to get a rare ration of milk and handing him half sticks of chewing gum.
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Another with favorable memories of Earl is Zandy Strangman, my rival on the camp soft- ball diamond. He told me he was present on the occasion that “poor Mrs Esmond” had to move out of the hut she shared with her daughter Deirdre, to allow Earl “a real gentleman” to move in after he and Deirdre had married.
And then there is Arthur Kerridge, my camp roommate, now a Texan with good working knowledge of the Web, who advised me how to download Louis Armstrong’s 1930 version of Shine, which he said was just as Earl West and his men performed it. By golly Arthur was right. Listening to that download, how I itched to run my fingers along the strings of Earl’s guitar! But it was no longer in my possession. After getting twelve good years use out of it in Australia, England and New Zealand, I handed it over to a young Russian in Wellington, NZ, keen to learn the instrument. I’m sure Earl would have approved.
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